Do party leadership contests forecast British general elections?

When assessing election forecasts, two important criteria emerge: their accuracy (precision) and lead time (distance to event). Curiously, in both 2010 and 2015 the most accurate forecasts came from models having the longest lead time—albeit at most 12 months. Can we increase the lead time further, supposing we tolerate a small decrease in accuracy? Here, we develop a model with a lead time of more than 3 years. Our Party Leadership Model relies on the votes of MPs when selecting their party leader. We assess the forecasting quality of our model with both leave-one-out cross-validation and a before-the-fact forecast of the 2019 general election. Compared to both simple forecasting methods and other scientific forecasts, our model emerges as a leading contender. This result suggests that election forecasting may benefit from developing models with longer lead times, and that party leaders may influence election outcomes more than is usually thought.     

A swing vote from the ethnic backstage: The role of German American isolationist tradition for Trump's 2016 victory

We question the growing consensus in the literature that European Americans behave as a homogenous pan-ethnic coalition of voters. Seemingly below the radar of scholarship on voting groups in American politics, we identify a group of white voters that behaves differently from others: German Americans, the largest ethnic group, regionally concentrated in the ‘Swinging Midwest’. Using county level voting returns, ancestry group information from the American Community Survey (ACS), current survey data and historical census data going back as early as 1910, we provide evidence for a partisan and a non-partisan pathway that motivated German Americans to vote for Trump in 2016: a historically grown association with the Republican Party and an acquired taste for isolationist attitudes that mobilizes non-partisan German Americans to support isolationist candidates. Our findings indicate that European American experiences of migration and integration still echo into the political arena of today.     

Membership vote for party leadership changes: Electoral effects and the causal mechanisms behind

Political parties in parliamentary democracies have increasingly democratized their leadership selection processes, incorporating the votes of party members. Despite generating numerous headlines, there has been a relative dearth of cross-national scholarly work on the electoral effects of selectorate expansion and the causal mechanisms behind them. This study fills this gap in the literature. Using observational data from eleven parliamentary democracies, we show that parties using membership selection can expect a polling boost when compared to those using more exclusive mechanisms. However, membership selection does not affect electoral performance. Nevertheless, our crossnational analyses and results from a survey experiment from Australia suggest that incorporating members generates excitement, demonstrates an openness to new ideas, and can be a signal of leader work ethic and a commitment to the democratic process, increasing leader legitimacy. We discuss the disconnect between these positive evaluations and the lack of electoral effects, and suggest possible strategies for parties to improve their electoral standing.     

When does inequality demobilize? New evidence from the American states

Income inequality has been rising throughout the industrialized world, particularly in the United States. This long been thought to depress turnout, but extant research has yielded mixed findings. Here, I argue that the inequality-turnout relationship is conditional, depending crucially on election salience. I test this by using three decades (1984–2014) of panel data from the U.S. states and by leveraging the fixed and exogenous occurrence of presidential (higher-salience) and midterm (lower-salience) elections. Overall, I find a negative and statistically significant relationship between income inequality and voter turnout in midterm election years, but a substantively small and non-significant relationship in presidential election years. I attribute this to the ability of presidential contests, relative to midterms, to counteract the demobilizing influence of high inequality, by piquing voters’ interest and activating citizens who would otherwise abstain. Overall, these findings help us to better understand of the politics of electoral participation in an era of high, and rising economic inequality.     

Coattails and spillover-effects: Quasi-experimental evidence from concurrent executive and legislative elections

Concurrent elections are widely used to increase turnout. We theorize and show empirically how concurrency affects electoral outcomes. First, concurrency increases turnout and thereby the participation of peripheral voters. Second, in combined elections, one electoral arena affects the other. In our case of majoritarian executive elections concurrent to proportional representation (PR) legislative elections, the centripetal tendency of majoritarian elections colors off to the concurrent PR race. Third, concurrency also entails spillovers of the incumbency advantage of executive officeholders to the concurrent legislative race. Drawing on quasi-random variation in local election timing in Germany, we show that concurrency increases turnout as well as council votes for the incumbent mayor's party and centrist parties more generally, with slightly more pronounced gains for the political left. As a consequence, concurrent elections consolidate party systems and political power by leading to less fragmented municipal councils and more unified local governments.     

The downstream consequences of long waits: How lines at the precinct depress future turnout

Researchers have increasingly paid attention to the impact that the administrative component of elections has on voter behavior. Existing research has focused almost exclusively on the effect that legal changes--such as voter identification laws--have on turnout. This paper extends our understanding of the electoral process by exploring how one aspect of the precinct experience--standing in line to vote--can shape the turnout behavior of voters in subsequent elections. I demonstrate that for every additional hour a voter waits in line to vote, their probability of voting in the subsequent election drops by 1 percentage point. To arrive at these estimates, I analyze vote history files using a combination of exact matching and placebo tests to test the identification assumptions. I then leverage an unusual institutional arrangement in the City of Boston and longitudinal data from Florida to show that the result also holds at the precinct level. The findings in this paper have important policy implications for administrative changes that may impact line length, such as voter identification requirements and precinct consolidation. They also suggest that racial asymmetries in precinct wait times contribute to the gap in turnout rates between white and non-white voters.     

The conditional effect of personal vote-seeking behaviors on MPs electoral performance: Evidence from an open-list PR system

Considerable research argues that voters reward personal vote-seeking behaviors. The expected electoral gain would be the primary driver of MPs' action. Nevertheless, empirical evidence is scarce, and the findings do not always match the theoretical expectations. This article examines the electoral impact of personal vote-seeking behaviors, arguing in favor of integrating party electoral performance into the models. I also propose a new measure of electoral performance based on the evolution of MPs electoral results. Drawing on data from Finland, the findings globally support the theoretical arguments. MPs benefit from personal vote-seeking behaviors, primarily when their party improves its results. The findings have important implications for our knowledge of the personal vote and, more generally, the personalization of politics.     

三十年来近代福建经济史研究述略

三十年来史学界围绕着近代福建经济诸方面课题展开了研究,取得了丰硕的研究成果,内容涉及近代福建农业、手工业、商业与对外贸易、工业、人口、移民、华侨投资、城市与腹地、土地制度、赋税、金融货币等诸多领域。本文对三十年来近代福建经济史的研究成果进行综述,并指出近代福建经济史的研究在广度、深度方面仍亟待拓展。     

马来西亚政党政治的变化及其走向

巫统一党独大是马来西亚长期以来政党政治的一大特点 ,但是 1999年末马来西亚第 10次大选却表明这种局面正在发生明显的变化 ,这必将对马来西亚的政局产生深远的影响。本文试从马来西亚政党政治变化入手 ,分析变化的成因 ,并对今后一个时期马来西亚政党政治和政局的发展趋势作一展望。